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5 Bonus Effects of Consolidated Billing for Insurance Carriers

April 29, 2016

Private exchanges are here to stay. As an insurance carrier, your product offerings are becoming more complex, and entering into strategic partnerships to provide a more robust set of benefits just adds more complexity for individuals and groups as they shop for benefits. You don't want them questioning what they're getting when it comes time to pay their bill. Not only does it hurt your customer satisfaction rating, it can also lead to costly inefficiencies within your business. By offering a simplified consolidated online bill presentment and payment solution for individual consumers and groups, you can provide customers an additional service while optimizing business processes to increase cash flow and reduce days sales outstanding (DSO).1

Your individual and group customers likely expect to manage and pay their bills online. It's your job to make the process easy to navigate and understand. Consolidated billing enables you to do just that by providing your customers – group or individual – the ability to view the total amount due and pay for all their benefits through a single user login. This requires coordination across each partner carrier involved but the result creates an enormous sticky-factor for a customer who is currently trying to sort out a mix of bills for their benefits across various websites and paper processes.

Think of online billing as a service you are providing to your customers to accommodate their varying needs. In addition, you get five bonus effects from reducing the manual processing required as a carrier:

Information is delivered in “drill-down” fashion. By starting with a simplified view, then offering the roster, retroactivity and line-item details, you improve the likelihood of the customer understanding their bills and servicing their own questions.

Individuals and groups no longer need to call when they lose their paper bill or make a last-minute payment because they can do so online.

Reconciliation is significantly decreased as bills become more accurate due to improved bill generation processes. Less time spent deciphering sticky notes attached to bills that are short-paid.

Payment history is stored online, relieving your call center staff and mailroom from managing this costly service request.

When the content of your bills is more accurate, accessible and digestible to your customers, it can reduce their “review” time, allowing them to make more timely and accurate payments, and even feel more comfortable with turning on “auto pay” each month (just like their car payment and Netflix) so your DSO is dropped even further.